I Watch Films: Inspector Gadget (1999)

 

Inspector Gadget (1999)

John Brown is a security guard at the Bradford robotics lab who wants to be a policeman. Sanford Scolex, a rival roboticist, breaks into the lab with a robot tank to steal a robot foot. In the ensuing chaos Artemus Bradford is killed, Brown blown up, and Scolex loses his hand. Bradford remains dead but both Brown and Scolex are given cybernetic enhancements. Scolex gets a claw hand from his assistant Kramer and Brown is given a complete body filled with gadgets by Brenda Bradford, Artemus’s daughter, and installed into the police department under the Inspector Gadget program.

Gadget, of course, is bumbling, makes mistakes, doesn’t use his gadgets well leading to chaotic slapstick scenes (this is based on a kid’s cartoon). Fortunately his niece Penny is bright and figures things out, pointing him in the right direction. Also he has a talking car that sometimes helps. Meanwhile some plot happens; Scolex tries to hire Brenda Bradford, but is turned down. Gadget, sent to do menial duties due to all the silly weirdness his gadgets do, tries to solve the Artemus murder. Scolex has Kramer build a Robo-Gadget who frames real Gadget by doing even stupider and more dangerous things.

The idea of making a live action Inspector Gadget came late for me, an adult when this came out, and seemed foolish. How could it possibly match the flexibility of animation? A quarter century on and I must admit that in that part at least it manages to convince in it’s choices of which gadget and what slapstick to show. Still a deeply silly and unneeded film.

Watch This: Undemanding slapstick gadget police story for kids
Don’t Watch This: Very silly, fails to acknowledge that this is, in fact, the plot of Robocop with all the horror that implies